Vince Cable

I wrote yesterday about the fundamental division within the Lib Dems between the Liberals and the SDP:

"Any political party is a coalition of sorts - we Conservatives certainly have plenty of tribes of our own, who disagree about plenty of issues. But Lib Demmery is a more divided creed than most.

Having been formed from a merger of two parties, it has never succeeded in bringing the left and centre any closer together. The rift extends to the social level as well as just the ideological - you don't see many deficit hawks hanging out over beers with the Keynesian wing of the party."

I didn't expect their conference in Glasgow to provide a more vivid demonstration of this than the economy debate, but an anonymous MP on the Liberal side of the divide has helpfully provided a confirmatory quote to The Sun's Tom Newton Dunn:

“We should boot out Vince Cable from the party. Him, and all the SDP lot. The merger hasn't worked."

Any party has its disagreements, but this of a different order - and it isn't going away.

Readers may recognise the two faces above. One is an ancient, grumpy and rather self-centred creature which claims to know secrets unavailable to ordinary mortals. The other is the Psammead, from Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It.

The cantankerous Psammead promises its audience that their fantastical wishes can come true - and then brings them crashing down to earth within a few hours. His uneasy coalition with the five children who discover it living in a sand pit is an uneasy one - without him, they would never be able to go on their adventures, but in return they have to put up with his constant grumblingand the limits of his powers.

I suspect you're starting to see that the resemblance with Vince extends beyond the eyebrows.

Most of the focus on the Spending Review has been on the practicalities, rather than on the element of showmanship involved.

It's obviously important to establish properly agreed spending plans for each department through the Coalition's full term in office. But there's also a hefty political element on the Chancellor's part - as can be seen by the chaos it has thrown the two Eds into, unable to decide whether they'll spend and borrow less, spend and borrow more or insist that both are possible.

That political motivation is also true of some of the Cabinet. It is telling that Vince Cable was the last one to agree a deal with the Treasury, and the very public manner in which he did it. James Forsyth of the Spectator was not alone in being briefed that the talks would last late into the night on Tuesday (though in practice they ended late yesterday).

Here
at ConHome, we’ve tended to mention the areas of political
overlap between Labour and the Lib Dems. Indeed, Paul Goodman highlighted two
such areas – pensioner benefits and the mansion tax – only last week.

But
there are now so many examples, with new ones by the day, that a brief list in
in order. Here goes:

For
any Kremlinologists among us, Lord Adonis’s new
book and his
interview with today’s Guardian are sure to be fruitful reads. Not only are
they about the Kremlinology of days past: about how the absence of any
relationship between Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown helped scupper a LibLab Coalition
after the last election. But they are also about the Kremlinology of days to
come: about how a LibLab Coalition might be born in 2015.

Among
Lord Adonis’s main points is that Labour should, as the Guardian interview puts
it, “prepare for coalition, even when [they] are fighting all out for a
majority”. He reckons that the mistakes of the last election ought to be
corrected, such that Ed Miliband reaches out to the Lib Dems now and dangles
the possibility of major Cabinet positions in front of their rapacious eyes.

In an interview with the House Magazine Vince Cable has attacked Theresa May's ambition to reduce net immigration to the tens of thousands:

"The reducing to under 100,000 is not Government policy and it would be unattainable without, if it was attainable enormous damage would be done, notably through overseas students, which is one of the biggest components, actually.”

Mr Cable - on the Left of his party - also uses the interview to defend his regular conversations with Labour:

"I think we have to have sensible working relationships with the Labour Opposition. I’ve done this anyway not for partisan reasons, but because there’s a lot of issues which I deal with which spill over into future Parliaments - and if you want to get support for the industrial strategy or banking reform you’ve got to get the Labour people to agree to it. And in any event I don’t believe in tribal politics. I believe it is much better to work with a consensus when you can get one. Clearly, there was a good working relationship but it all it tells us about the future is that when we come to the next general election we will be going into it with an approach based on equidistance."

The Business Secretary also gives the strongest indication that he plans to go on and on...

"I take the view that as long as you’ve got bags of energy and stamina and capacity to do the job and I do have a lot of energy and stamina, I’m perfectly fit and healthy... Deng Xiaoping totally transformed China in the last century. I think he was 80 when he took over. And he survived the Long March.”

What's Vince Cable up to? The Business Secretary has a cumbersome essay in today's edition of the New Statesman which every newspaper has written up as an affront to George Osborne. The Staggers' George Eaton has already provided a excellent summary, so that you don't have to plough through all 3,800 of Mr Cable's words, but I thought I'd bash out another for ConHome. Three things stand out from the article:

i) A call for more capital spending, perhaps funded by borrowing. Mr Cable's central recommendation is an increase in capital spending; he reckons that the extra £5 billion announced in the Autumn Statement was too modest to really boost the construction industry and that wider economy. This suggestion is unsurprising – Nick Clegg has also made noises about capital spending – but it is significant. It represents another shift towards the idea of a fiscal stimulus, which the Coalition has been careful not to emphasise, nor really endorse, in the past.

I’m
not saying that Nick Clegg will resign. Nor that the allegations surrounding
Lord Rennard and his party, as dispiriting as they are, necessarily yet warrant a
resignation. But the past week has certainly raised the prospect of blood
further down the tracks. Mr Clegg’s appearance on LBC radio
this morning didn’t create the impression of a man who is in control of his
own defence – let alone of his own destiny.

So
what would happen if he did resign? The first point to make is that it would,
most likely, fray the ties that bind the Coalition together. Relations between
the Tory and Lib Dem leaderships may no longer be all roses and chocolates, as
they were at the start of this Government, but Mr Clegg is still – as I’ve written
before – a natural ally for David Cameron. He remains one of the most
effective advocates of coalition itself, and of this Coalition’s policies. He
remains a venomous
critic of Labour and of their policies. He is an adhesive
helping the whole thing stick together.

When
it comes to other senior Lib Dems, something similar could be said of Danny
Alexander and David Laws. Norman Lamb, too, is someone who might do easy business
with the Tories. And perhaps, to a much lesser extent, there are Ed Davey and
Jo Swinson.

If
you believe that David Cameron’s likeliest route back to No.10 in 2015 is
another coalition with the Lib Dems, then then the past fortnight may have been
rather perturbing.

Reason
being, there are increasing signs of unity between Labour and the Lib Dems. Of
course, the two parties appear to be split—between a 10p tax rate and raising
the personal allowance—on the best way of lightening the tax burden on
low-income workers. But, apart from that, they have basically coalesced in
their response to Oliver Letwin’s Royal Charter for press regulation and in
their demands for a mansion tax.

And
Labour are even trying to smoke out Lib Dem support for their mansion tax
proposal with an Opposition Day debate in the Commons, or perhaps even—as the
Spectator’s Isabel Hardman reports—an
amendment to the Financial Bill after the Budget. This crude politicking has
left Vince Cable, for one, cooing
and flirting. He won’t be the only Lib Dem who feels some attraction
towards Labour at the moment.

Today’s
the day for pre-emptive strikes. Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander, Nick Clegg and
Vince Cable are all spread across the airwaves, attacking David Cameron’s
Europe speech in advance of its delivery tomorrow. And so their main points of
difference with the PM have become clearer, but also — more neglected — their
similarities. Here’s a quick run-down of both:

i) All three
party leaderships agree with the “referendum lock”. As you’ll
know, the Coalition Agreement contains a policy whereby “any proposed future [European
Union] treaty that transferred areas of power, or competences, would be subject
to a referendum on that treaty.” This is something that Labour has previously
spoken out against, describing it — among many other epithets — as a “political gesture”.
But, as the New Statesman’s George Eaton points
out, Ed Miliband now appears to have changed his mind. Speaking on the Today programme
earlier, the Labour leader admitted that he would not repeal the legislation.